A Friday night in a college dining hall isn't where most people expect to experience a divine act. But for Daniel Ho, that's where it started and where he experienced his most memorable moment of discipleship.
During his sophomore year at Baylor University in 2021, a conversation began in the campus’ Memorial Dining Hall where Daniel and his friend, Aaron*, discussed Scripture. Having grown up Hindu but now identifying as an atheist, it was out of the ordinary that Aaron showed this kind of deep interest.
(*Aaron’s name has been changed in this testimony out of sensitivity.)
“I was a little nervous, but mostly excited,” Daniel recalls. “There are times when you are in a faith conversation and it moves forward quickly seemingly without you even needing to push it.”
Daniel Ho - top right of back row in a backwards white cap - poses with other InterVarsity volunteers at Baylor. While he was an undergrad at the college in 2021, he had a life-changing conversation with a friend.
After four hours in the dining hall, the pair moved to Aaron’s apartment where they spent another two hours reading from Daniel’s bible and talking about John 1. Aaron froze when he got to John 1:42 for the first time: “And he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas’ (which, when translated, is Peter).”
“He looked up at me, with the word of God open in his lap and explained to me, with the tiniest bit of uncertainty and fear in his voice, ‘I want to meet Jesus, but I don’t know if I can, because I think if I do, he is going to ask me to change,’” Daniel recalls Aaron telling him.
What had stopped Aaron as he read was his reaction to what Jesus asked of Simon — to change something as integral and important to his life as his name. Aaron wrestled with what it meant if a relationship with Jesus could feel so strong with such immediacy it could compel someone to live by a new name. “How could Jesus do that?” Aaron asked.
“My first priority was to love and care for [Aaron], helping him think through his existential questions,” Daniel said. “And, in an attempt to imitate Jesus, I tried to ask thoughtful questions that would help him reflect on his own position. In that moment, I felt like Jesus's disciple, sitting there with [Aaron] as Christ moved the conversation along.”
Daniel walked him through just how powerful the gospel could be in changing a person’s worldview and how they saw themselves.
“In my life, my discipleship to Jesus has been about two things: recognizing where God is working and receiving God’s invitation to participate in His work,” said Daniel, who has served as a campus minister for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship since 2024. “This moment expanded my imagination, my recognition that God is working, in every part of my life, and in every part of my friends life. That there is no part of me and no part of the world that God does not desire to make new.”
There was no altar call, no thunderclap of conversion. Just two college students and a question that had found its way to the surface.
"As someone who has spent a lot of time in Christian spaces, God's constant presence and work in the world is something that I affirm," Daniel said. "But I don't know if it was something I expected or looked for."
In August 2025, Daniel led a training at Blacknall for InterVarsity volunteers.
That night reoriented Daniel’s heart. He admits that his life was built around an expectation of creating and living out his own plans, “but this moment showed me that my life is built around God’s actions and God’s plans.”
When Daniel shares about discipleship, this is still the story he reaches for five years later — not because it's the most dramatic thing that ever happened to him, but because it's the most honest.
“In this moment, Our Lord drew near to my friend, and with a fear in his voice that he did not understand, Aaron confessed a truth of Christian discipleship and following Jesus as Lord: When we meet Christ and are bound to him, he will change us,” Daniel said. “And I was there, but I was very aware that I was the proverbial ‘third wheel’ in the room. Jesus had drawn near to Aaron and Aaron, at some level of his being, had recognized this.”